As close as possible to the vigorous and yet fragile body in its nudity, it is immediately there, an element of what we call nature. It is there, with as much presence and intensity as this shimmering lake and this tree bark, that the wind on golden cereals and that the insect on its skin.
Harvest Immediately affirms his sensory inscription in this vibrant campaign of a thousand life, human, animal and plant, domesticated and wild. What era? First, it could as well be antiquity; Finally, it will rather be between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Walter, this blond man with a wrestler’s physique, is a weakness. And this being so intimately linked to the surrounding nature was not born there. It was adopted by the village of farmers on which we can see that a column of smoke rises.
When he rushes to lend a hand to put out the fire, soon he burns himself awkwardly and will no longer be able to act. He knows who are the incendiaries, but will not denounce them. When foreigners, including a very beautiful black woman who immediately arouses the concupiscence of all men and the jealous hostility of women, are discovered and accused of the package, he will not move.
Walter is at the center of the film. He is certainly not a hero. He is a witness, halfway through membership and exclusion, torn between various attachments, starting with what binds him to the Lord of the place. This one, Master Kent, is himself a owner only for having married the one who was the heiress, now deceased, as died of the peasant wife of Walter, who had, as a servant, accompanied Kent from the city.
Funny Lord that this Kent, both arrogant when he is perched on his magnificent and benevolent mare with the villagers, shy and abrupt, childish and domineering. Thus goes the beginning of this film which continues to confuse by the powers of the sensations which it arouses while shifting from any known or predictable mark. Neither lost paradise nor sinister hell, the agrarian world where begins Harvest is populated by beings, humans or not, that no simplism freezes.
An exceptional film
It is a great staging operation, as much as a script, that the Greek filmmaker Athiná-Rachel Tsangári (with a major work which echoes, in a very different way, to its beautiful first feature film, which had made it visible in the world of cinema, Put ahead (2010).
It was fifteen years ago, she was the major personality of an ephemeral Greek “new wave”, in which only the rving and cunning figure of the only Yórgos Lánthimos was imposed. Since then, despite another feature film, Knight (2015), she had more or less disappeared from radars of international cinema.
Athiná-Recaché Tsangári reappears in Scotland, with an exceptional film. Exceptional by its construction, his way of telling, the way in which he will give life to multiple registers to individuals, a community, to practices – farming, rituals, political. And exceptional by vifness coherence between this cinema proposal and the decisive historical events to which it refers.
Like the eponymous novel by Jim Cracce, published in 2014 under the French title Harvestwhich he is inspired by but which he transforms significantly, Harvest is crossed by one of the most important phenomena of human history, the one that is summed up under the term of movement of enclosures.
To the sources of capitalism
Identified legal decisions taken in Great Britain from 1600, this movement designates the private appropriation of the set of land hitherto partly shared community and cultural, breeding and gleaning practices, which allowed both subsistence and structured the collective organization of human groups, everywhere in Europe.
In short, this is nothing less than the birth of capitalism, with titanic effects in the destruction of social ties, loss of the notion of “commons”, misery, massive migration (especially towards what will become the United States).
This is the production of a working mass for the factories of major cities, towards which peasants are driven out, in particular those whose land is assigned to the industrial breeding of sheep, whose wool will provide the main raw material of the first industrial revolution.
All this – and much more – is in Harvestbut in a dramatized, embodied mode, thrilling with sensual and painful pulpit, vibrating with emotions, anger and terror. And it is sudden that this considerable phenomenon has never been told in the cinema. Amazing? Yes and maybe not that much. Because such upheaval also calls to upset the rules of the filmed story.
“Move any predictable benchmark”this is what will happen to all the inhabitants of the village, as in Walter and Kent, with the imposed establishment of fences, thanks to the work of the sympathetic and attractive cartographer artist who paints with so much attention the fields and humans, hills and rivers.
As the cinema will do later, what came from afar – it is black – works for the domination of the world by giving beautiful representations with its paintings. And what is transgressive in the way of filming and telling athiná-rachel Tsangári also comes from critical concern about the effects of figurative and narrative arts.
From there too, Harvest does not do anything as we would expect, do not show the fictions usually show historical events, as characters come to represent – with a recognizable way – such or such social and moral posture.
If the breath of the western and the shadows of the fantastic haunt him, it is to better explore the violent singularity of what happens, without idyllic vision of the world which will disappear or fable console.
Animals and masks, words and skies, obvious anachronisms, the precision of gestures and materials invent and reinvent, move and worry the adventure of the nameless village, the chronicle of Walter and the peasant Kitty Gosse, the dark tale of perhaps witch who haunts the thickets and that of the aristocrat Jordan, landed with the city and rational future plans and rapist nervies.
Lightning earthquake on the scale of a village (the film takes place in a few days), slow earthquake on the scale of a continent and the redefinition of the organization of human societies (upheaval always in progress with the privatization far from being completed of what was supposed to be common, the air, the seabed, the digital data), the process of the enclosures also called a movement of narrative forms and representation.
It is his permanent invention, in this great sabbath of images and sounds, body and emotions that is his film, which made that the great work of Athiná-Rachel Tsangári went almost unnoticed to the last Mostra of Venice, where he was undoubtedly the most important film, without any separation between artistic importance and historical and political importance.
Under the lucid and disoriented gaze of Walter and that of the spectators, an unknown, immense world, carrying wealth and incredible violence burst, erupted. This is called the future and it is our world.
